After the Future

Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary

If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia.  The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was full of mystery and enchantments that the Romantic feels as a kind of memory but no longer possesses. This kind of nostalgia is often enough benign, but it frequently enough manifests in a kind of toxic social psychology. It links those who would fly the confederate flag longing for the Old South with the Germans who dreamed that they could be once again Teutonic warriors with Islamic mullahs who dream that a Muslim civilization may once again extend from east Asia through Europe. They long for a lost culture that in their imaginations, whatever it may have been in reality, in which people were deeper, more spiritual, more connected, more human.  Romanticism is a reaction against the soul-flattening, social leveling and mechanistic materialistic rationalism that is, in the Romantic's view, the spirit of modernity.

I think that this kind of romanticism explains Bill Buckley's reactionary Catholicism and all that came with it: his hatred of communism, his defense of Franco's Spain,  his defense of McCarthyism, why he supported the war in Vietnam but had no enthusiasm for Iraq. (The mullahs, after all are romantic reactionaries like him). And this longing for a lost romantic nobility distinguishes him from other red-meat, John Birch conservatives and neoconservatives on the American scene with whom he consorted but never felt comfortable. Those other conservatives are motivated by fear and powerlust; Buckley was not, his conservatism was rooted in a romantic idealism.

I think also for Buckley his playing the romantic reactionary was kind of a lark. He was deep down the trickster mocking the pretensions and hubris of the modern welfare state. He was a more sophisticated, lighter-hearted, wittier, and gentler Ann Coulter: somebody who didn't take himself and his quixotic projects that seriously. He had a lighter, cooler style and enjoyed more the jousting and the skewering of the less-nimble establishment liberals like David Susskind with whom, in my youth, he seemed eternally to be debating on his TV show. He defined himself primarily not as "for"  but "against," and what he was against was communism and all of its offshoots, because communism was the modern disease par excellence, and from the spirit which animated it, all the ills of the modern age flowed. I never saw him as a corporate capitalist.  His defense of capitalism was motivated not by his loving it, but by its being the opposite communism. My guess is that if he could live in an ideal political-cultural world it would be under a doge in 15th-century Florence or Venice.

I think that this important to understand because for the kind of romantic reactionary Buckley was, American liberalism was just a watered-down version of Marxism. The spirit of modern liberalism was the same as the spirit of communism-- its materialism, its naive optimism, its rejection of tradition and religion, its rational mechanistic solutions to social problems, its top-downism, its Jacobin hubris. His life's purpose was to wage war against the mindset that characterized secular liberalism which for him was a disease that eviscerated the soul and made humans into gutless, dependent, children--"men without chests," as C.S. Lewis described moderns in his Abolition of Man. This is important to understand if you're to understand the animus of Buckley's kind of conservatism against what for most sensible people seems the benign common sense of liberal welfarism. For such romantics Liberal programs are not common-sense solutions to practical social problems; they are the emanations of a spiritually crippling social disease.

And so for all of his elan, Buckley in the end was an irrelevancy. It's the problem of all reactionaries who refuse modernity rather than embrace it in order to live through it. I would contrast him with another kind of traditionalism--the kind, for instance, that the radical social critic Ivan Illich represents.  Illich was a Catholic priest with deep family roots in old Europe. Anybody who knows his work knows that for him tradition was not something into which he retreated nostalgically, but was the source for his radical and energetic critique and imagination of solutions. From Cayley's Conversations with Ivan Illich:

Illich has often drawn attention to how traditional his views are and to how novel such views can seem in the context of contemporary cultural amnesia.  As early as 1959 he introduced an essay called "The Vanishing Clergyman" by saying that he was not writing "anything theologically new, daring, or controversial."  "Only  spelling out of social consequences,"  he went on, "can make a thesis as orthodox as mine sufficiently controversial to be discussed." In these pages, he remarks that today "it's very difficult to speak about . . . things which seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition."  " I often have the impression, he says, "that the more traditionally I speak, the more radically alien I become."

No kidding. Anybody who has been reading this blog over time knows that I am sympathetic with the conservative critique of modernity while at the same time refusing conservative solutions for the problems of modernity. So I understand where Buckley is coming from, but I completely reject his politics and his imagination for a cure. People like Illich are fecund with future possibility, while Buckley's vision in the end is barren.

I wonder if Illich ever appeared on "Firing Line".  That would have been a very interesting conversation.

Debate Fatigue

I taped it, but I'm not going to bother to watch it.  Everything at this point seems anti-climactic. Only interested if something gamechanging happened, and apparently nothing like that did. I watched enough post-debate highlights to have confirmed my basic assumption that Clinton is in an impossible position. Obama flicks away her attacks with humor and ease. No need for him to do anything more. Only drama left is whether Obama will win both Texas and Ohio, or just Texas. I hope, but don't expect, that she will concede next week.  It's time to move on to the next stage.

Realignment

I was listening to our local public radio earlier today, and the subject was Nader.  Most people calling in were supportive of his candidacy, and angry at the people who criticize him for being an egomaniac.  You'll find a similar sentiment expressed here at P.M.Carpenter's blog. One woman called in who voted for Nader in 2000, but said that she won't this year because everything has changed since 9/11, and while she agrees with him on domestic issues, she doesn't think that Nader would be tough enough on terror. 

Huh?  Is she actually thinking of her vote for Nader as if he were a real candidate? Do people really think about their vote so abstractly without any reference to the real-world context in which they are going to cast it? The idea that a vote for Nader is anything more than a protest vote is absurd. I voted for him in '96 for that reason--and also in 2000. I can say in my defense that I really didn't expect Gore to lose because I couldn't believe that the country could take someone like Bush seriously. I was clearly wrong about that nationwide, but right about it in Washington State--the only place my vote mattered.

I agree with Nader that a single-payer system to provide universal health care is the best solution. I'm guessing about 15% of Americans tops think so. Is Nader's running for president going to increase that percentage? Is it going to change anybody's mind?  No because he is perceived as a politically impotent irrelevancy with no real base. It doesn't matter how right he is if he is incapable of building the kind of support that will enable him to actually do something instead of criticize. So he can criticize Obama all he wants about how he isn't taking a strong enough stand on this or that issue, but it is so much impotent posturing.  And this is not a time for impotent posturing because we really have for the first time in a long time a real possibility to move forward. I'm not angry at Nader for entering the race; I'm just dismayed at his obtuseness.

The only people who are capable of taking him seriously now as a real candidate seem to relate to him as if the only thing that mattered was his positions on the issues. No, the most important thing that needs to happen now is realignment--to develop a new center-left majority. And that means progressives have to meet the sensible, but not necessarily sophisticated, people in the middle where they are, and to appeal to their basic decency. If you can do that effectively, the finger-to-the wind cowards in congress will follow. Most are not ideologues, most are shallow careerists trying to survive from election cycle to election cycle. They follow whatever seems to be the path of least resistance.

The Republicans with a few exceptions have been remarkable for their refusal to break ranks with their insane leadership. They have demonstrated that they are a cowardly pack of dogs which does whatever the Alpha Dog commands, no matter how transparently stupid the rationale. The Democrats haven't been much better; too many have failed to stand their ground in opposition because they don't really believe in anything except their own self-interest. So the only way to change things in Washington is to mobilize a majority of Americans to demand that their representatives there behave differently. There has to be bottom-up pressure. If the representatives don't believe in anything except their survival, they have to be made to understand that their survival depends on realigning center left. If that can be effected, then the hard right becomes once again a marginalized minority of cranks as politically irrelevant in the future as Ralph Nader and the Green Party is today. 

Obama represents that kind of realignment, and this is what Nader supporters and Obama's critics to the left don't seem to get. It's not about being pure in one's positions; it's about crafting a real-world strategy for developing a broad based consensus that can move things forward to serve the flourishing of the broad American citizenry. 

P.S. Interesting LA Times article here about Obamacans in Ohio.  Without people like these becoming part of a broad consensus, no substantive move forward can happen.

Obama the Subsidiarist

Frank Rich's column this morning makes much the same point about Clinton's campaign I made in this post last week: for all her vaunted experience and management expertise, the two most prominent opportunities for Clinton to demonstrate her executive competency were her heading the healthcare task force in her husband's administration and now her running the campaign for the presidency. Rich also sees the ineffective way she has run her campaign and squandered her advantages as analogous to the ineffective, top-down, un-reality-based way Bush has run the Iraq War, and I think the analogy has bite:

It’s not just that her candidacy’s central premise — the priceless value of “experience” — was fatally poisoned from the start by her still ill-explained vote to authorize the fiasco. Senator Clinton then compounded that 2002 misjudgment by pursuing a 2008 campaign strategy that uncannily mimicked the disastrous Bush Iraq war plan. After promising a cakewalk to the nomination — “It will be me,” Mrs. Clinton told Katie Couric in November — she was routed by an insurgency.

The Clinton camp was certain that its moneyed arsenal of political shock-and-awe would take out Barack Hussein Obama in a flash. The race would “be over by Feb. 5,” Mrs. Clinton assured George Stephanopoulos just before New Year’s. But once the Obama forces outwitted her, leaving her mission unaccomplished on Super Tuesday, there was no contingency plan. She had neither the boots on the ground nor the money to recoup.

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. 

Maybe the ineffectiveness of the campaign is more Mark Penn's fault than Clinton's, but even so, she picked him. And that choice tells us that she relies on the conventional Beltway politics that has been at the heart of the Democrats' ineffectiveness for the last two decades.  It's John Kerry's cluelessness and out-of-touchness all over again. Will the Dems ever learn? Well, uh, yes.  Obama clearly understands that the conventional Democratic establishment approach doesn't work and has crafted an effective alternative campaign strategy that has been executed almost flawlessly. So on the first head-to-head test of comparative competency and effectiveness, Obama wins hands down.

You pick the team you are comfortable with and which reflects your values and governing philosophy. Clinton's choice for a campaign team  tells us that she will pick people who understand the Beltway reality but not the world outside it. Obama is hardly a radical outsider the way Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader is. He's got one foot inside the Beltway box and one foot outside of it--which is essential for anyone who is going to change the reality of the way things work inside the box. A total outsider can't do it; neither can a total insider. Howard Dean had that insider/outsider quality, too, but he didn't have the charisma or the communication skills to pull off what needs to be pulled off. Obama does.

I think it's fair to say that Clinton on the other hand is someone who has both feet inside the box. She has a typical Beltway insider's top-down imagination of reality. That's how her experience shapes her thinking and imagination, and that's the biggest difference between Clinton's DLC-style liberalism and Obama's progressivism. Obama is more instinctively a subsidiarist, Clinton more the product of the sixties/seventies style liberalism for which there is no problem government can't solve. The subsidiarist, unlike the sixties era liberal, is not interested in central government social engineering, and, unlike the conservative/libertarian, sees an important role for central government to play in solving problems the market or local communities cannot serve on their own.

But, heres the difference: the subsidiarist looks at government as the problem solver of last resort. This is an important distinction that seems to be missed in the general discussion among progressives and in the clumsy criticisms directed toward Obama from the right. His liberalism is not a watered down version of state socialism.  Obama, I think, is offering a progressive-oriented governing philosophy that is fundamentally different from the conventional sixties/seventies liberal approach. I might be projecting a little bit here, and if it turns out I am I'll own up to it, but there are some solid indicators that I am more right than wrong about this.

Texas Debate

Victory is in the eye of the beholder, but It seemed a clear win in every respect for Obama. Hillary had her moment at the end, but it was not the moment of a winner.  It was the moment of a resigned, gracious loser. It followed her taking punches on the "get real/Obama supporters are delusional" issue, the  plagiarism issue, and the Iraq vote judgment issue. She lost on all three. I saw that last moment as a sign of resignation that she simply cannot keep up. It showed a graciousness and humanity that reflects well on her, and I think the audience appreciated that. But I don't see it as giving her any momentum coming out of this debate.

Obama has this halting way of speaking at the beginning of the debates that can be a little disconcerting, but he picks up steam and exudes a confident fluency as the debate proceeds. He ended very strong.  On the issues, it was a wash on Cuba, immigration, and the economy. He held his own on the health care. The main takeaway there is that he knows what he's talking about, and that reasonable people can disagree about the best way to get to the goal of providing affordable healthcare for everyone.

At the end of the day, he's the guy who can bridge the racial, regional, and religious breaches that causes such deep rifts in the culture today. He did a good job of looking ahead to the battle with McCain. I liked his line about the president having to me more assertive than has been typical for the last 20 years in reaching out in foreign relations to repair the damage done by Cheney/Bush.

Bottom line: He made no mistakes, and in this race did not give Clinton even the slightest, skinniest lane to pass.

McCain's Integrity

I don't think the argument holds that this will unite movement conservatives around McCain as the victim of the liberal media's old gray lady. This is a terribly damaging story, and it's hard to believe that there's not a lot more to it that will be forthcoming.  McCain's adamant denial this morning that there is any truth to it means that either the Times has been completely irresponsible or that McCain is lying. Either is possible, but which is the more likely?  And if the story becomes one of McCain's lying about all of this, it clearly undermines whatever shred of credibility he has about being the straight shooter.  It's hard to see how he could survive that.

One could also ask if this is Huckabee's miracle or a second one for Obama. If this knocks McCain out, could Obama waltz into the White House essentially unopposed the way he waltzed into the senate after his GOPer opponent dropped out because of sex scandal?  This time with Mike Huckabee playing the Alan Keyes role? How strange would that be?  It raises question about Obama's working and ongoing contractual arrangement with the big red-complected fella with the horns and the long, pointy tail.

But let's leave aside questions who benefits most from the release of this story. The story, whatever the motivations behind its release, is now out there, and it's a stick that stirs the hornet's nest of McCain's past. All kinds of things will now be revisited, including his involvement with the Keating five, the scandal in the early nineties about Cindy McCain's Limbaughesque addiction to painkillers, which she stole from a non-profit she headed. Not to mention McCain's caddish behavior while still married to his first wife. There is a pretty ugly picture that emerges from behind of the carefully crafted image of the straight  shooter. McCain is starting to look a lot more like Giuliani--or just like another typical GOP pol in the pocket of Big Money.

Obama's Legislative Accomplishments (Updates 1-2)

I thought Chris Matthews was playing gotcha politics last night when he picked on Texas State Senator Kirk Watson demanding that he state what, if any, legislative accomplishments Obama has in the Senate.  He didn't ask the Clinton surrogate to name Hillary's accomplishments; she might have been equally flummoxed--most people would be. Olberman clearly thought it was a cheap shot, and asked Matthews what if anything the Senate as a whole has accomplished in the last seven years, and Matthews had no response. Are senators in the business of accomplishing anything?  Their primary purpose seems more passive and deliberative. And their main claim to fame in the last seven years has been to rubber stamp Bush administration war policies and his agenda to erode the rule of law. But whatever.

In any event I did a little research to find out what Clinton has accomplished in her career since 2001.  I don't care about this question to look into it more deeply so if someone has a different understanding, I'm open to be corrected, but Clinton's accomplishments don't amount to much.  She's done some stuff for constituents and for homeland security after 9/11.  And let's not forget her work on the all-important flag burning issue. This biography also talks about things she's worked for, but has little to say about what she has actually accomplished. That might not be her fault because the Senate in its current deadlocked state seems bent on accomplishing little.

In response to the Matthews' attack on Stark, these Baltimore Sun writers defend Obama. Take it for what it's worth.  They point to work he's done on nuclear nonproliferation, accountability, and ethics in the senate and to several things he accomplished while in the Illinois state legislature. 

I have never bought the line that Clinton's experience dwarfs Obama's.  McCain in the general will have more of a right to use that argument than Clinton has now. She has fewer years in elective office.  She's smart and talented, but I think it's legitimate to ask how far she would have risen if she were not married to Bill. She worked as a corporate lawyer while he worked as a community organizer. Obama's experience in that respect helps him to have the bottom up perspective that I think Clinton has no instinct for.  And that shows in the ineffective way she has run her campaign.

The argument that she will be a solutions, get-it-done executive is absurd. What are the two major public areas in which she has been in charge? The healthcare project in '93 and now her campaign. She bungled both badly. She has had all the advantages and has squandered them because at the end of the day she is a clueless, paint-by-numbers, political hack.

UPDATE 1: For more on Obama's legislative record in the Senate, Obsidian Wings has a good post on that dating from 2006.  See also here.

UPDATE 2:  Here's Kirk Watson's gracious statment explaining that his mind just went blank: "In the meantime, let’s not lose focus on what’s important in this election. It’s not my stunning televised defeat in “Stump the Chump.” Thankfully, it has nothing at all to do with me."

Wisconsin (Updates 1-2)

Obama continues to exceed expectations. There was talk over the weekend of a Clinton win or at least closiing the gap to within 5%. It's looking at this point to be a 12-15 17 point loss. There seems to be a 60/40 pattern locking in here. I don't know that Obama will take Texas by double digits, but I'd be surprised if he loses. He may lose in Ohio, but it wouldn't surprise me if he wins. In both states we can be sure that he will exceed expectations.

Clinton is looking the part of the loser. It was symbolized in the way that all the networks switched to Obama's speech in Houston in the middle of Clinton's in Youngstown.  It was clear in the way Obama was looking ahead in his speech with hardly even a nod in Clinton's direction. It's feeling very much that it is over.

Tell me if I"m wrong, because it's not like I listen to every word, but in Obama's speech tonight I heard for the first time a promise to close Guantanamo, restore habeas corpus, and end torture. Maybe I've missed it, but I've not heard these issues come up in the debates, nor have I heard them coming up in the stump speeches. And it was good to hear that someone is concerned enough about the erosion of the rule of law to mention it in a rally speech.

It's clear that Obama understands that the enemy isn't rank-and-file Republicans, but the big-money lobbyists and the Democrats and Republicans who are complicit in the K-Street system. Exactly. I don't know if he can do anything about it, but he's framing the problem correctly, and I think he correctly understands the only way those interests can be defeated: by a broad, energized consensus of Americans who will not put up with it anymore.

He speaks like a subsidiarist when he says that he's not for government doing for people what they can do for themselves, but recognizes that when things get out of balance the only fix is the power of government working for the broad public interest. He's someone whose experience in community organizing has helped him to understand that change comes from the bottom up, and cannot be imposed from top down.

According to Chuck Todd on MSNBC, Obama's pledged delegate lead is over 150 now.  Clinton needs to get 58% of the delegates in the remaining contests to pull even, and she's not going to be close. Obama needs 65% of the the remaining contests to get over 2025 in just pledged delegates, but he needs less than 50% of the remaining superdelegates to get to that number.

So next it's the debates. Expect the attack to be on Obama's commander-in-chief qualifications and Obama's legislative accomplishments in the senate.  That's a weak point for , but I'm not sure Hillary has much to match it with.  Both seem to talk more about things they've done before their relatively short senate careers began.

UPDATE 1:  When it's bad, it's bad.  The Clinton campaign is now on the defensive about the plagiarism accusation? If Obama's campaign can turn that mistake into a positive, there's no stopping it. Obama has Reaganesque teflon. Will yesterday be looked at in retrospect as the day the dam broke?

UPDATE 2: I think that when we start our retrospectives, South Carolina will also be seen as a critical turning point.  At that juncture, the race/gender divide seemed to be the most important factor. I was wrong in my thinking then that the Clinton strategy of trying to make Obama look like the Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton candidate would be more effective than it was. I think it could be said fairly that it backfired in a way that changed the course of the campaign. It played into a sub-narrative that the Clintons will do anything to win, and in a curious way it inoculated Obama from further Clinton attacks: "That's just the Clintons doing their politically calculated thing."  That's how the plagiarism attack is playing now.

It will be interesting to see if Obama is inoculated from attacks from the Republicans in a similar way. It could be that the country is just sick and tired of that kind of thing, and it just won't work anymore.  Or if it is going to work, there will have to be a new viral strain that the GOP will have developed for which there is no prepared defense.

But as I wrote in an earlier post, certain candidates seem more vulnerable to branding by the opposition.  Dukakis, Gore in 2000, and Kerry were blank screens onto which the opposition effectively projected their movie.  Candidates like Reagan, B. Clinton, and Obama radiate their own light and the movie their opponents want to project onto them was or is simply obscured by their inner glow.

Political Immaturity

I was googling this morning looking for the original 1997 article written by David Brooks and Bill Kristol about "national greatness conservatism", and I came across this article by Jonah Goldberg written in May 2001 entitled "Grading Greatness." In it, just a few months before 9/11, Goldberg wrestles with the Kristol/Brooks idea, which he is kind of attracted to, if only it wasn't associated with John McCain. I was not particularly interested in conservative internal squabbles before the war,  so I hadn't known that  neocons like Kristol supported McCain in the 2000 election cycle. That's a fact that should influence our thinking about the current election.  McCain is someone who was ten years ago, and should be now, tarred with the "national greatness conservatism" brush.  The whole idea of "national greatness" is an idea that epitomizes what I think of as political immaturity.  Let me explain:

I think that one of the best measure of a person's or a society's maturity lies in the way they confront that which they fear the most. And let me go out on a limb here and posit that what humans fear most is identity annihilation. Death is bad, but humiliating death is the worst. Death is humiliating, and every humiliation is a kind of death.

There is a whole death/humiliation complex that is behind most of the intentional violence we see, whether it is the attacks of terrorists, or crazed campus shooters, gang violence, or nations invading nations. All violence and the justification for it is cut from the same humiliation/grandiosity cloth. The terrorist who feels himself to be at the extreme of powerlessness and humiliation can get a quick shot of grandiosity by turning the tables and annihilating the identity of others. Is this really essentially different from the need so many Americans felt to just flail at the nearest target in the Middle East after the humiliation of 9/11?

The Horserace This Week

The Clinton campaign is going to go for anything it can to bring Obama down a notch or two, even to the point of its allying itself with McCain's talking point that insists that Obama work within the public funding campaign restrictions. (See here for a parsing of what Obama actually committed to.) More damaging, I think, is the Clinton camp's accusation that Obama plagiarized a Deval Patrick speech. It's not an accusation that bothers me personally--he has in the past attributed things he's said to Patrick, even if this time he did not. All writers borrow, and in this case the failure to attribute is a venial sin, but it might play out in a way that hurts him: it raises doubts, even if only temporarily, about his authenticity. As in sports, very often the winner is the one who makes the fewest mistakes, and this clearly was a mistake. We'll see if it has any staying power.

But let's be real: not every word the candidate speaks comes out of his own head; it's a collaborative effort between the candidate, his speechwriters, and friends. Jon Stewart proved during the several weeks he had no writers that he is very capable of developing good material on his own; Obama has proved as much as well in the past.  No one questions his basic talent with language. But when you're working under deadline, it's so much easier if you have a team to support the effort. 

So if a candidate collaborates with his speechwriters--and  friends like Patrick--in trying to come up with a strategy on short notice to quickly counter, for instance, the accusation that "words don't matter", why not use an effective strategy developed by an ally like  Patrick? Is the problem that he used Patrick's words (all politicians use other people's words) or that he didn't give him credit for it (He did it with Patrick's blessing)?  I don't blame Clinton for trying to make some hay with this issue, but at the end of the day it's a trivial "gotcha" issue that has no real substance. 

But that's the way the game is played, so we'll see if either of these issues has an effect on the race tomorrow in WI.  If Obama gets a solid win, then probably no blood drawn.  If he loses, then that would be a tremendous blow, a strong indicator that Obama's momentum has been stopped. I doubt that will happen.

Texas is tightening, and I think Ohio will as well.  If Obama splits with Clinton on 3/4, that's all he needs to do, and Texas is looking very winnable right now, even if Ohio is still a long shot.  But quite frankly the polls are only the grossest indicators, and they are hard for me to take too seriously one way or the other.